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Some congregations use bulletin blurbs, some post a “Prepared to Vote Checklist” in the window from ELCA.org/civicengagement resources, some help neighbors check their voter registration status during church activities or at shelters they work with – among many creative approaches that fit their setting. Our civic engagement as people of faith can help ensure that everyone benefits from the good of government. Resources and ideas for this important non-partisan service by faith communities an election year are reprinted here by permission from the “Faith in Elections Playbook” of Interfaith America.   Trustworthy information Faith leaders and religious organizations have a…

I thought I would share a little theological exegetical reasoning I engaged in, almost 28 years ago now. This was before I had ever received any formal theological training; read any deep theology books; learned the original biblical languages, so on and so forth. But I had been a Christian since a young child; I had grown up in the home of a spiritually sensitive pastor’s home (my dad); and was around ‘biblicist’ churchy thought my whole life. So, it wasn’t like I had no theological resource, indeed, we operated with what today might be called Free Grace theology. I…

As usual, in the right online environs, the Calvinist-Arminian (Provisionist) debate has carried on unabated by not actually engaging with the actual entailments of a real-life Calvinist-Arminian theology. In other words, what the reader will find, are people who are in this interminable joust, oriented by the five points of Calvinism, or not. There is a free-flow exchange between favorite prooftexts, and their ostensible exegesis, and/or an intractable debate about this or that philosophical understanding vis-à-vis God’s sovereignty and human agency in freewill. I am almost positive that everyone reading here is well aware of what I am referring to….

As I have been rereading TF Torrance’s The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons, I came across a passage that struck me as a sort of theological-exegetical gloss of Romans 8:31-39. Torrance is often accused of not doing any biblical-exegetical work; but I would counter, that in his role as a Christian Dogmatist his work is saturated in the thematics that allow Scripture to say what it does about God and His works. I would contend that, Torrance, as a Christian Dogmatist, par excellence, has Scriptural themes and their reality in Christ, pervading all of his writings. What…

You can’t change what you don’t know. So how much do you know about the impacts of colonization on Indigenous people in past generations and in the present? What does “MMIW” mean to you? When we know the truth and embrace it, we begin the process of building and strengthening right relationships with our Indigenous neighbors. To that end, last month the ELCA launched a Truth and Healing Movement. Watch a video of Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton announcing the creation of the movement. As explained in a news release, “[t]he ELCA’s Truth & Healing Movement will enlist and empower members…

The Deus absconditus (‘hidden God’) is the Deus revelatus (‘revealed God’) in Jesus Christ. But how do we know this? Because Jesus said so; He demonstrated so. A genuine Christian theologian isn’t given to fits of speculation about godness. A genuine Christian theologian is definitionally such simply by the confession that they are Christian. But much of this has gone by the wayside in the development of dogma in the catholic Church. In Latin theology for example, where Thomas Aquinas has been canonized, for both the Catholic and Protestant theologian alike, the method for developing a doctrine of God is…

The following is a repost from September 25, 2018. It is this kind of thinking that moved me from a premillennial understanding of the last times, to an amillennial perspective (although I still retain the right to a historic premillennial perspective depending on the moment). The following post sounds like I have no interest or time for paying attention to geo-political and theopolitical trends as those might or might not pertain to God’s inbreaking into the world in an end times type of way. I am a futurist, I think you have to be because Jesus was; because the Old…

  On May 18, ELCA Presiding Bishop Eaton and 44 ELCA synod bishops wrote to Congress about their concerns related to the funding of Augusta Victoria Hospital. Read the full letter here: ELCA Bishops’ letter to Congress concerning US funding for Augusta Victoria Hospital. In the letter they ask for the Members of Congress to “support the transfer of $ 120 million to USAID to meet the urgent humanitarian needs of the Palestinian people in 2022. These allocations are needed to cover the PA’s debt to AVH and the other East Jerusalem hospitals.” Ask your Members of Congress to restore…